Thanks guys.
Now I decided I'm going to have to give this a bit more time. Dual boot and other methods seem to complicated for me. I am going to wait this out as well as learning more about it and hopefully switching eventually.
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Pick anything in the top listings there/major page that is vaguely aimed at new users (most things that are not arch fitting this bill)
Virtual machine.
Most would suggest
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads for personal use.
Open program, press load this iso, set hard drive size (other default settings should be fine), press go, follow on screen instructions. If you choose to install it there then it will make a file/folder of however many gigabytes on the drive and you can copy that around almost like any other file (or delete it, though better to go to the program and do it there) and then you can open the virtual machine and press go to have it load up.
You can also reverse this and install Windows in the virtual machine on Linux if you wanted.
Dual boot.
Burn iso to disc if old school or USB otherwise (
http://unetbootin.github.io/ is generally what is suggested). You can play with that all you want and get the general experience, some will even save changes to a USB and load those back up next time if you want. Optionally install to second drive if you want/have one* or install to partition on existing hard drive (which it can handle too -- say shrink this by this much before installing to that and let it do it for you). Select during boot (can set to whatever to autoboot as well if you want) and load accordingly.
*depending upon what your machine is, laptops being more annoying to have second drives or replace them quickly (though USB3 is fast enough to count), then some will spend a token sum and get a secondary drive to play with -- nice SSDs can be had for next to nothing these days.
Some will have the third way where it exists within the Windows setup (WSL is but one take, other takes have existed since Windows XP was current).
Re command line. Did we all fall into a portal to 2006 again? Certainly you can use it and it is very powerful, would not discourage learning it either (command line is fundamental to being an accomplished computer user whether you are on Windows or Linux and has massive power when it comes to doing tasks that are desperately annoying to accomplish with a graphical user interface). 99% of stuff for desktop Linux will be clicking on UI elements if you want with most of the major distros aimed at anything like being user friendly (get one that actually is and even more so). Even in the 1% then 95% of that will be copy and pasting things in an instruction list.
Re tech illiterate. In some ways that might be an advantage -- it is usually when windows "power users" try to go across under the auspices of I are good at computar (and indeed they might have the common fixes for things almost on muscle memory -- while I can read French it was not that which sorted disable and enable before rejoining a wifi network for someone with a French laptop) then find it different. Going from scratch then being a boon if they have specific fixes and modes of operating down as their troubleshooting method rather than
https://xkcd.com/627/ .
Re software. Yes modern games are annoying (WINE is useful but not necessarily something I would go wholesale in, though I am returning to the virtual machine thing above), and yes big money software packages tend to be that. Most things being done in a browser though means Firefox and its ilk or Chrome and its spinoffs (which includes Opera these days). Equally if you are paying for Microsoft office you are going wrong somewhere, not to mention there are methods that work for that. I have some more sympathy if you are wound into Adobe products though I will stand up for the open source options there as well as being far nicer once they click for you.
